Thank a veteran today

As Memorial Day approaches, an we think about concerts, picnics, junefests and camping, let us take a moment and remember the veterans who serve now and who have served and are gone.

I’m planning my 50th class reunion and I know that many of our classmates were in Vietnam and some are gone. I honor them all.

This is taken from a speech by Ronald Reagan on Memorial Day 1989. I think it is a good read for Memorial Day.

“All of these men were different, but they shared this in common: They loved America very much. There was nothing they wouldn’t do for her. And they loved with the sureness of the young. It’s hard not to think of the young in a place like that, for it’d the young who do the fighting and dying when a peace fails and war begins. I know that many veterans of Vietnam will gather today, some of them perhaps by the Vietnam Wall. And they’re still helping each other on. They were quite a group, the boys of Vietnam — boys who a terrible and vicious war without enough support from home, boys were dodging bullets while we debated for the efficacy of the battle. It was often our poor who fought in that war; it was the unpampered boys of the working class who picked up the rifles and went on the march. They learned not to rely on us; they learned to rely on each other. And they were special in another way. They chose to be faithful. They chose to reject the fashionable skepticism of their time. They chose to believe and answer the call of the day. They had the wild, wild courage of youth. They seized certainty from the heart of an ambivalent age, they stood for something. The lesson of the century, I think, ‘We must be strong enough to create peace where it does not exist and strong enough to protect it where it does.'”